Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to lesson nine,
module three, social perception. In module 9.2 we discussed social
cognition, that is how people think in general. For this we’re going to
discuss social perception, that is how we see the individual.
Let’s move on to slide
two to begin. When we’re forming an impression of another person, there
are four components; the visual, informational, inferential, and
evaluative. The visual component is essentially what you see when you
look at the person. The informational component is what you’ve been
told about the person or what information you might glean from anything
that you have in terms of information about that person. For example,
someone told you this person’s name is Joe. That would be informational
impression formation. They told you what their major was. But the
person was wearing a name tag that told you that name, that would also
be part of the informational component. Inferential. This is when we
use the person’s behavior that we’re seeing currently to infer other
things about that person. For example, if we see this person is a nurse
and appears to be very helpful, we may presume this person is overall
nice and would also be helpful if not in the nursing roll. And finally
an evaluative component. This sort of gut response or perhaps
more thoughtful response since we take the information we’ve received
from the other three components and determined an evaluation. You like
the person, you don’t like the person; we think the person is a good
person or not a good person.
Let’s move on to slide
three. How do we acquire impressions or impression acquisition. There
are at least three ways. One is observation, that is watching the
person. If you go to the mall and you see people that you’re not really
familiar with, but you might watch them, you will have visual
information, informational information about what kind of clothes
they’re wearing, what sort of class they seem to be from. You’ll also
have inferential information; are they being kind to their children, are
they upset with their children and finally some sort of evaluative
information. This is all done from observation and simply watching
the person. The second way in which we can acquire an impression
is through direct interaction. That is, you might actually have an
interaction with the person, so if we happen to stop and talk to them at
the sale rack while we are going through clothes. These interactions seem to be
the most powerful. If the person is nice to you, you will assume that
they will be nice to you always and probably nice to others. If they’re
mean to you, you might assume that they’re going to always be mean and
are mean to others as well. These are very powerful first
impressions and hard to change.
Second hand reports. This is when you’re told what someone is like.
You’re given an impression from a friend of yours. These are not very
reliable but also have more power than other types of information. For
example, the second hand report comes from a good friend versus a
newspaper, we may be more likely to believe our good friend.
Let’s move on to slide
four. Why do we form impressions? One is because anticipation is
functional. It is good for us to be able to anticipate what someone’s
going to do. Is this person going to harm us or not harm us, will this
be a person who’s good for us or bad for us, will this person be helpful
or not. Some psychologists have put forth evolutionary explanations.
That is, it’s evolutionarily adapted to determine who will hurt and who
will harm, as well as who will help and be beneficial to our survival.
There are also sociological explanations, that is, the sociologically
beneficial to form an impression of another person in order to determine
whether they’re part of your group, not part of your group and so on.
And then what happens if we’re wrong about our impressions. We’ll
discuss that in more detail soon. If you click on the black box, you
will find what some might find in a senseless but altogether good way in
which our impression of Porky the Pig may not be altogether correct.
Let’s move on to slide
five. So what makes up the visual component of impression formation?
The first and most salient visual information is attractiveness.
(inaudible), or what is beautiful is good effect. Is the
idea that we believe that attractive people are smarter, they’re nicer,
you think they’re warmer and ultimately they’re more likely to be
helped. In fact, in emergency room settings, they find that the more
attractively dressed a person is, the longer a life saving effort will
be made. We know that in the court, an attractive person is seen
as less guilty
of a crime and given a lighter sentence than a less attractive person,
with one exception. If a person uses their attractiveness in the
commission of a crime, then they do not receive a lighter sentence and
are more likely to be found guilty. A con artist would be a prime
example. Who’s more likely to get the job? Attractive people. There
are some baby-faced exceptions, that is, people who are very attractive
that tend to have more of a baby face may not get the job, even though
they’re attractive, because we like to think of people being mature and
having a mature face would be more in a leadership role, more able to do
the job. If you click on the mature face logo, you will see it more
from mature to baby face. In addition, we know that taller men make
about 10% more in terms of annual salary than men shorter, even though
in the same level in a company, the same position at different companies
and so on.
Let’s move on to slide
six. Another component is the visual information that we glean when
forming impressions comes from non-verbal behavior. There are many
non-verbal signals that we might send; crossed arms, the way in which we
cross our ankles or legs in terms of away or towards a person are all
seen as a sign of friendliness or defensiveness and even people who
aren’t aware of that distinction or haven’t studied non-verbal behavior,
will report that people who cross their arms they consider less
friendly, they think they’re colder, they’re less likely to want to
interact with them in the future. Non-verbal behavior also includes
vocalization. Up speak is a prime example. Up speak is when you raise
the tone of a sentence at the end, making it sound like a question. For
example, saying the sky is blue? The movie is good? I like eating
there?; makes you sound unsure as though you’re questioning your own
opinion. In the ‘80s, especially teenage and young women, used this
type of up speak and it was seen as very incompetent. Mimicry. They’ve done vocalization studies of Larry King and find that when he is
interviewing someone that is of lower status than he is, that is, a
lower level celebrity, that they tend to mimic him in terms of speech
thought, style, sitting, posture and so on. However, when Larry King is
interviewing someone that he respects, sometimes of a higher status than
he himself is, he tends to mimic their non-verbal behaviors, their
vocalization and speech pattern. Facial expression is also very key
when forming an impression of another. We’re very good at deep hugging
emotions. These pictures show you what might be five emotions. Some
people say there are six basic emotions, but they tend to be universally
recognized. In terms of decoding, females tend to be better at reading
emotional expressions than males, but this is not true for anger. Men
are much better at detecting anger in a facial expression than women
are.
Let’s move on to slide
seven. Another component of non-verbal behavior is facing. For
example, in elevators we have a scheme about how to stand. You stand
facing the door, dividing the distance in what should be equal parts, so
if you’re alone in the elevator, people tend to stand fairly in the
middle of the elevator. When someone else comes on, they tend to split
the elevator evenly in half, still both facing the door. However, there
are different expectations between women and men about where to stand in
an elevator and what is an appropriate space between self and others. Women tend to have
their space invaded more often and like to make eye contact with others
who are in the elevator in order to determine whether they are a threat
or not, whereas men tend to avoid eye contact in elevators or other
tight spaces as a way to not challenge others. Postures are also
another form of non-verbal behavior. For example, men tend to take up
more sitting room, they tend to sit every other seat in a movie as
opposed to sitting next to another man, they tend to take up more room
by crossing their legs knee to ankle, they tend to spread their
belongings out further, claiming more space. Women, on the other hand,
tend to have better posture, sit more straight, have more symmetrical
posture. Powerful postures are those in which you’re asymmetrical, that
is, the left side of your body is not doing the same thing as the right
side of your body is doing. However, women very rarely engage in these
postures, even though doing so would allow them to gain power. There
are also a number of gestures that are cultural as well as age related
gestures that may come and go in terms of their appropriateness. For
example you may have elderly relatives who feel that pointing with the
middle finger is perfectly appropriate while many younger folks feel
that that is an offensive gesture.
Let’s move on to slide
eight. Eye contact. When we’re acquiring an impression of
another person, eye contact tends to be key. There is a distinction
between gazing and staring. Those who lack social skills tend not to
know the difference. To gaze at someone is to not look them necessarily
directly in the eye and it is not seen as a challenge. They typically
last fewer than two or three seconds. Staring will usually last longer
than that and tends not to be seeing the person or looking into their
eyes so much as looking at their eyes. These need to be taken as a
challenge for both humans and many other animals. Pupil dilation is
often a sign that we like another person. If our pupils are highly
dilated, then we see that as a sign of liking and in the past, women
used to put certain chemicals in their eyes that would allow this
dilation so that they would appear more attractive. This may be also
part of the reason that when we are in dimly lit areas, we seem to
report liking people in those dimly lit areas better than when we are
under fluorescent lighting. Touching is another part of visual
information. Who’s touching whom, how do they touch people? There’s
some powerful ways to touch people and some non-powerful ways. I’m sure
you’ve learned about good hand shakes and bad hand shakes. A nice
strong hand shake conveys something about confidence. While a more
fish-like hand shake involves an impression that is seen as less
competent.
Let’s move on to lesson
nine, module three. I hope you’ve enjoyed this lesson. Thank you for
listening.
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